Cucumbers

"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out as good for nothing."

I wonder if the man credited with saying this back in the 1700s - a Dr. Samuel Johnson - ever received fortnightly shipments of random vegetables from nearby farms. Perhaps, flummoxed by what do to with them, or tempted away by more alluring food stuffs, allowed their taut green skin to erupt with slimy brown dimples. Did he push them to the back of the refrigerator until patches of white fuzz appeared?

Relief spread through me when I recently cut open what I thought was a cucumber and found the innards of a zucchini.

It's not that I hate cucumbers. I harbor no traumatic memories of being gored by vegetable spears as a child or even worse, being forced to remain at the dinner table until I finished this crunchy, watery portion of my meal. I cannot imagine gathering enough passion about cucumbers to have ever given them a great deal of thought until now. It's just when faced with a choice of cucumbers or something else - something else is always more tempting.

I was almost lulled from cucumber apathy by a few pickling cucumbers shaped like small bowling pins. But I made the mistake of putting them away in the refrigerator and never thought about them again until it was too late.

Then tomato season hit. And I became crazy for something (I think) I invented called Tomato Salad. I chop up a few tomatoes (maybe two or three, or more depending on the size), dice some onion (maybe half an onion), perhaps a clove or two of garlic (depending on how much onion I use), chop a green pepper (if I have one and am not saving it for something else) and some cilantro (the amount you include I suppose will depend on how much the flavor reminds you of soap). I add a few tablespoons of sesame oil and basalmic vinegar and top it off with salt and red pepper seeds. Stir and eat. For weeks I was crazy about it. Every day I would fantasize about it and make it as soon as I walked in the door after work.

But one day I did not have enough tomatoes.

I looked in the fridge and found a cucumber that somehow had not yet realized it had been dispatched to its chilly, clammy death. I chopped it up stirred it in and found a way to stretch the tomato salad.

So thank you cucumbers for serving as a segue to the thing I actually wanted to eat. In the future I will try to imagine more ways your green rinded blandness can further my future gastrointestinal agendas.

With grudging respect,

Ashleigh